Orphans of the Great Depression

Edward Newhouse, Maxwell Bodenheim. Edward Dahlberg. I'm guessing these names don't ring any bells. But Jason Boog thinks they should. In a wonderful piece in the Wabash College magazine, Boog, a freelance writer and an editor, tells about his own experience of being laid off in 2008, and struggling to make ends meet with his writing. During this dark period, he writes, there were only a few authors who spoke to his predicament, among them Newhouse, Bodenheim, and Dahlberg, a trio of New York writers (Newhouse and Bodenheim wrote for The New Yorker) who went through something similar during the Great Depression. Bodenheim, a best-selling novelist who lost everything in the crash of 1929, was forced to peddle poems for twenty-five cents apiece in Washington Square Park. Newhouse chronicled the plight of the homeless in the Bowery in his 1934 novel "You Can't Sleep Here." Dahlberg covered a police crackdown on a protest in Union Square in his 1932 "From Flushing to Calvary." Their books captured the times, but also the experience of struggling. Bodenheim wrote in 1934:

There’s something wrong with this world all right, but I can’t put my finger on it…Something must be wrong when a fellow can’t get a decent wage, can’t tell when he’s going to be fired, can’t look forward to any promise of happiness. Something is rotten somewhere.

Boog took refuge in this "literature of failure," as, presumably, many did when the work was first published. So why did it drop off the map? Boog guesses that

Americans don’t like to dwell on failure. As soon as the economic crisis passed, literary scholars abandoned these novels from the 1930s. Bodenheim spent the rest of his life in and out of flophouses, and never wrote another novel. Both Dahlberg and Newhouse went on to have careers as writers, but their 1930s work hasn’t been reprinted.

The Depression-era work of all three writers is, alas, orphaned (out of print but still under copyright, and thus not viewable on Project Gutenberg or Google Books). It seems a shame, doesn't it? We are awash in information about our current predicament and confronted constantly with the literature of speculative doom, but what might truly help us is literature documenting the social realities of living and writing in lean times. "We need their stories now more than ever," Boog concludes, "because nobody builds monuments to failed men."

(Left: Maxwell Bodenheim; Right: Edward Dahlberg)

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